>There's a thought. That sounds workable. Thanks.
>
>My initial impression is child forms are somewhat unruly (or maybe underdeveloped). Do you agree or disagree?

The you want the standard answer or the answer from experience? Standard: it depends. From experience: it depends.

A child form is usually a free-floating modal form, called from the parent form to enter some data (or just parameters) that have no place in the main form - are not part of the regular data entry, are related to a side task (say, printing a report, entering a new record into a lookup table, searching, looking up a pop-up grid etc). They may or may not share the datasession with the parent, they may be modal (more often than not), and they may return a value (or object) to the caller form.

Now if you wanted the child form within the parent form - that sounds like your parent form is a MDI form, but in the MDI paradigm child forms are free floating inside the parent form. This paradigm was invented for apps that handle one file per window, like Word.

Now you want the child form to be in a fixed position over your form - which makes it a perfect candidate to not be a form at all, but rather a container. Sergey's already suggested a pageframe (tabbed or tabless - up to you) to hold your grids, which I would also suggest - except he's faster, as usual :).